Your Hand Would Be With Me
by Systemic Anomaly
Summary: Whisper in the dark, and everything changes. Say something bitter in rage, and what if it's the last thing you ever say to them? Lying may be a constant, but so is death, and to Lisa Cuddy that's the biggest cheat of them all. Sequel to previous story.


Wow. I can't believe I actually _did_ this.

**Title:** "Your Hand Would Be With Me" Sequel to "We Have Dreamed Too Little"  
**Author:** Honestly, why do I even _include_ this one?  
**Word count:** 1,690 exactly  
**Pairing:** _Very_ House-and-Cuddy, this part.  
**Rating:** Let's go with T/M again, to be safe.  
**Warnings:** Thanks to concrit, I'll pare down the warning. Angst, although... ehhh. Non-explicit sexual activity... and I do mean _non-explicit._

**Notes:** Just a couple. I wrote a fic called "We Have Dreamed Too Little" a few days back, and the response was awe-inspiring. Several people had reviewed and asked me if there was any more to the story, and what really _happened,_ at the end. Since telling that part doesn't ruin the first partor at least I don't think it does, and since I could _not_ for the _life_ of me get the barefoot-Cuddy image out of my head, I had no choice!

Dedicated to several people for wonderful support. Also, to someone _else_, but they know who they are. I've actually been toying with the idea of making this an entire arc.

The first part/original fic is here.

Also, the excerpt near the end isn't mine; it's been quoted _ad nauseam_ online, so if anyone knows the original source, _please_ let me know. Oh, and the weird formatting near the end isn't a mistake. 

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In the end, nothing ever happens when you're prepared for it. Preparation? It's only the way we have of trying to impose order on the chaos. If we believe we can control everything, we'll never be surprised. Because surprise brings change; and hurt; and passion. And once it's hit you there's no right and wrong anymore, and nothing is ever the same.

_Technical term is narcissism. You can't believe everything is your fault unless you also believe you're all powerful. You see the world as it is and you see the world as it could be. What you don't see is what everybody else sees: the giant, gaping chasm in-between. You're not happy unless things are just right. Which means two things: you're a good boss, and you'll never be happy._

The people in charge of everything are always the last to know when something's wrong; maybe, in their assurance that they've done everything they possibly can, they forget that, sometimes, there are some things they _can't._

Lisa Cuddy learns this lesson when a spike of pain bolts up her calf from the studded tread beneath her feet and she realizes that she's left her shoes upstairs, beneath her desk, where things are safe and sane and well-lit and organized into tidy piles of papers and truth, and not splashed gaudy with red and blue and terror.

The stairs are foreign to Cuddy, as she runs; even the _idea_ of running seems as if it's something from another time, another place. When once she'd felt as if she were flying, with every heartbeat that her shoes left the ground, these stairs seem tricky, sentient, ready to mire her bare feet in sloppy living concrete, to send her flying, yes: to a sudden, crashing halt.

In her formless panic, she has entirely forgotten the elevators.

When she shoves her way past the thin huddle of whispers outside the hydro room, when she pushes through the doors and into the chlorine-drenched darkness, Lisa Cuddy is no longer a doctor, no longer an administrator_Who was responsible? How much damage? Who was on-shift? What does the media know?_. She has become a still camera, it seems, living and breathing and seeing in snapshots.

Drying scuff marks, on the tiles. _Snap._

A thin scrim of blood, staining the clean blue water a red that she has seen far too many times, seen enough of for a lifetime. _Snap._

A body_OhmyGod_, sprawled in a senseless tangle of limbs and sneakers, _Converse_ sneakers, to be exact, one foot still langorously bent, forever reposed with a serenity that is in sheer stark contrast to the motion blur of paramedics, of police. The white sheet above it is no longer white, exactly. _Snap._

A gun, oily death congealed into form, uniform crouched before it like an offering. _Snap._

And the knapsack, wet now, canvas smell like wet dog and Cuddy remembers, crazily, a dog she'd had as a child; August lakes and jingling collars and that _is_ Greg House's cane lying abandoned in one corner, fractured nearly through, left behind like a forgotten pet ditched on a summer evening's roadside at vacation's end, a pet that once was loved, and cared for, that once meant _everything._

That's when Lisa Cuddy snaps

_her head back, against his shoulder, and he laughs softly against her neck, although his hands never still. "Your hair..." he begins, sounding as if he means for that sentence to end in something bitterly amusing like _is smothering me_, but the sound of his own voice, rough and harsh, silences them both. She knows how long he's thought about this, his long fingers wound into her dark hair, and even if she will later spend a sleepless evening wracked by doubt and fear and shame, even if they _both _know that this cannot honestly go _on_, that risk-to-career-and-reputation is neither something Cuddy wants nor something Greg House would _allow _her to want, when they come together it is like a force of nature._

He is free_, with her, or so he's said, loose-tongued with booze and Vicodin; she neither fears him nor is intimidated by his genius. And where others might retreat from his venom, she bites back just as hard, and he needs that. She _knows _he needs that, just like she needs to feel the way he makes her feel now, listening to his ragged breathing, listening to the sounds of a man who has made do with empty rooms for far too long._

His hands, fingers tracing the shadow of her collarbone, and when he strokes the back of his hand across the swell of one breast, the soft shaded light catches a scar across his wrist. The tiniest scar, like a child's, like an afterthought. Cuddy thinks to ask him about it but by then he has silenced her mouth with his own, stale whiskey and cold coffee but she is pivoting in his arms, and if he has cried in his sleep while she cradles his head, if he has raged and wept against the world, and if she is the only one who knows _this it doesn't _matter _anymore just now, because he is forming the moan into the sound of her name, shifting because her hands are on him now, her hands_

are clenched, now, clenched at her sides and there are hands on _her,_ now, on her upper arms, urging her back, someone raving at her in unintelligible gibberish that sounds a lot like _You have to get back, Dr. Cuddy, we've got a gurney coming through,_ and she wants to tell them that she's the boss, that she's a _doctor,_ for God's sake, and to _let_ her _through,_ because she's stupid, and selfish, and because she'd once told him in a moment of rage that if this was all that meant anything to him, then he deserved to be miserable.

That if he kept on  
like this

that

the world

wouldn't

_miss_ him,

and that caring wasn't a defect, oh no, but it certainly _had_ been, hadn't it, and she was blind, now, the rattle-snap of metal wheels loud as the Apocalypse and if he had finally listened to her, finally _listened_ to her after all this time, then who else's fault was it but hers?

_You aren't going to be his first, his last, or his only... He's loved before, and he will again. But if he loves you now, what else matters? He's not perfect, you aren't either. and the two of you will never be perfect. But if he can make you laugh at least once, cause you to think twice, and admits to being human and making mistakes. Hold on to him and give him the most you can. He is not going to quote poetry, he's not going to be thinking about you every moment, but he will give you a part of him that he knows you could break. Don't hurt him, don't change him ... don't expect more than he can give. Try not to over-analyze. Just smile when he makes you happy, yell when he makes you mad, and miss him whenever he's not there._

And as the gurney brushes by her, sweating paramedics shouting orders and crackling radios and _Let's get him upstairs,_ and boots slipping on slick tile, as the idea of the void without him rises up like a drowning tide of bile in her throat--

_"I could run home."  
"No, you couldn't."_

"You think of something to make me miserable, I think of something to make you miserable: it's a game! And I'm going to win, because I've got a head start. You are already miserable."

"I'm the only one that can control him."

--a cold, clammy hand reaches out and grasps her wrist, and as lost as she is in this moment, as far as she is from nice doctor words like _detached_ and _objective_ and _professional,_ Lisa Cuddy nearly screams.

Until her brain catches up with her eyes, and there is the tiniest scar on the turn of the wrist.

Like a child's, like an afterthought.

Until she clenches her nylon-clad toes hard against the cold and the half-lidded blue eyes watching her dully from a nest of sterile white do not go away.

Until he _smiles,_ wet hair crumpled to his forehead, the oxygen mask pulling his face into strange contortions with the movement of his lips, bare chest wired and hooked and hand impaled with a line like some strange symbiotic nightmare.

_Don't expect more than he can give. Try not to over-analyze. Just smile when he makes you happy, yell when he makes you mad, and miss him whenever he's not there._

Through the ice, through the sweat and steam and cold, through her frozen heart, through the traitor wetness, hated _weakness,_ from her eyes and they're wheeling him past her, now, nudging her aside, checking vitals, checking sats. Taking him away, and Lisa Cuddy squeezes her eyes shut and hears herself murmur, "I _hate you."_

And Greg House smiles, squeezing her wrist one final time as they pass, upward to Emergency and ventilation and the small leaking gash just below his knee... upward, to this.

To her.

_Would that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain._

He smiles, as they snap the gurney down. "Yeah," he tells her softly. "I hate you, too."

And gone; but hate_and the look in his eyes_ is something she can work with.


End file.
